[James Nighthawk]

Hey Guys and Gals

I have seen this mentioned on here before, so I am pretty sure there are people that can help!

I am new to promoting on Youtube. Are there any hints to increasing hits/playcount there? Tags seem to be key but I am new to this so all advice welcomed!

I am uploading a cover version soon which will doubtlessly get more hits than my original songs. Hopefully if viewers like it they'll stick around to check out my songs :-) That is the only "tactic" I have at the moment

Thanks in advance!!

Jxx

[James Nighthawk]

FYI my tags as stands:

acoustic guitar music folk singer songwriter singersongwriter "Original Song" James Nighthawk martin finger-picking finger picking live recording studio male vocal vocalist "Singing (Professional Field)" "Rock Music" unsigned

Also
The quotation marks are the ones that I clicked on, suggested by youtube, rather than typed in. I assume the quotation marks themselves make no odds, right?

[Dutchbeat]

James, i wish i could be of any help,

but my most watched you tube film didn't even reach 400 views yet

but perhaps, i can be of some help in saying, the tags you use are about the same as the tags i used, so my advice is get more and different onces....
i think you need totally out of the box onces on top of the onces you have, but without cheating

my thinking never got any further than that 

hope other forum members can help

[habiTat]

I've not had much luck on YT so far, except with an acoustic cover of 'Walking in the air' , you know, that Aled Jones song from the snowman. Its not very good and has been on there a while but its got 2400 odd views, waaay more than anything else I've uploaded. My tags for this were..

Walking Christmas snowman john air guitar song live festive carol factor no.1 choir

Now I reckon it was mainly the song title that got the hits so your strategy of doing covers of popular songs might be a good way to hook people in, if you 'wow' them they may add you to favourites.

Maybe go for the seasonal route with the covers, that way, each Christmas, you get new people searching for the song you may have covered. Or just a song currently charting, but this will have a limited life in terms of popularity, and therefore a limited amount of people searching for it.

I'll be keenly watching this thread for tips

[flossie]

Hi James,

I have had a bit of experience with this, I think the tags are important and also the title is very important too. You can put the name of the song somewhere else if it is not going to pull in the views.

Go to google adwords, You'll probably have to sign up, hover over tools and analysis and click on keyword tools. Choose keyword idea which is a bit further down on the page and type a word that is related to your music, for instance for my song I typed fathers day it gave lots of alternatives to this and shows you how many searches are made locally and globally - this helps you pick the best words for your video. Using my video as an example, you have to put each tag word or group of words in inverted commas i.e 'father's day' or 'father' etc. 

After you have finetuned your tags, give it a week or two and see how it performs - you can use analytics on your video manager page on youtube to see where the song is most popular and really finetune it to its most appropriate market.  Consider who is likely to listen to it.  If it has a theme ie my song is called 'You're my hero' so people looking for father's day songs might be interested.  Is yours suitable in a tribute to someone or for some other occasion or historical event, this might help increase your views. Also if you get comments, remember to reply or like etc make sure you interact with your viewers. 

You can also use your video as a video response to other more popular videos on youtube - go to where you can comment on the video 'all comments' there is a little arrow, click that and it will say video response click that and choose your video.  Some will let you instantly respond some will need approval and some won't let you at all!  I have only discovered video response today whilst trying to help you so thanks for that!

Good luck and let me know if I can give you any more help!
x

I am no expert and there is still plenty to learn, but I hope some of this has helped!

[James Nighthawk]

Hi James,

I have had a bit of experience with this, I think the tags are important and also the title is very important too. You can put the name of the song somewhere else if it is not going to pull in the views.

Go to google adwords, You'll probably have to sign up, hover over tools and analysis and click on keyword tools. Choose keyword idea which is a bit further down on the page and type a word that is related to your music, for instance for my song I typed fathers day it gave lots of alternatives to this and shows you how many searches are made locally and globally - this helps you pick the best words for your video. Using my video as an example, you have to put each tag word or group of words in inverted commas i.e 'father's day' or 'father' etc. 

After you have finetuned your tags, give it a week or two and see how it performs - you can use analytics on your video manager page on youtube to see where the song is most popular and really finetune it to its most appropriate market.  Consider who is likely to listen to it.  If it has a theme ie my song is called 'You're my hero' so people looking for father's day songs might be interested.  Is yours suitable in a tribute to someone or for some other occasion or historical event, this might help increase your views. Also if you get comments, remember to reply or like etc make sure you interact with your viewers. 

You can also use your video as a video response to other more popular videos on youtube - go to where you can comment on the video 'all comments' there is a little arrow, click that and it will say video response click that and choose your video.  Some will let you instantly respond some will need approval and some won't let you at all!  I have only discovered video response today whilst trying to help you so thanks for that!

Good luck and let me know if I can give you any more help!
x

I am no expert and there is still plenty to learn, but I hope some of this has helped!

Great stuff Flossie, big hugs!

The adwords and the inverted comma part is all new to be so I'll check those out soon

Does it matter if I use ' or "....? Youtube insets " whereas you mention 'these'?

[James Nighthawk]

Thanks again to flossie for getting me rolling on this. I found the following hint video from her push...

This seems to have some very useful and simple hints regarding the quotation mark system, and I have duly gone through my tabs and edited them.

Also, DO NOT USE hyphens (-). Search engines see them as negatives, and ignore the word after them. Good knowledge.

I'll wait a few weeks and see the results

My new tags are

"acoustic guitar" "acoustic guitar music" "folk singer songwriter" "folk singersongwriter" "rock songwriter" "singer songwriter" "Original Song" "James Nighthawk" "Not The One" "Martin guitar" "finger picking" "live recording" "studio recording" "male vocal" "male vocalist" "Singing (Professional Field)" "Rock Music" "unsigned singer" "unsigned songwriter" "Riverway Studios"  "Songwriter (Profession)"

If you can think of obvious ones I have missed, let me know....

Also, of note

http://www.videobroadcastservices.com/why-is-youtube-no-longer-showing-tags/

I mostly agree with this, although, it is less helpful to my evil domination ways...mwah ha ha!

[flossie]

No probs! I would add "beautiful song" "songs about relationships" "love song" "breaking up song" etc, etc, so describe the song as well, think about what someone looking for that sort of song would type into the search bar. 

Obviously if it they have the title in mind they would type that, but many people are just looking for something different to listen to, or have gone through something and like many of us use music to accompany their joy/misery  Oh and make sure you use every last tag you're allowed to - that's important too in my opinion you may as well!

[James Nighthawk]

No probs! I would add "beautiful song" "songs about relationships" "love song" "breaking up song" etc, etc, so describe the song as well, think about what someone looking for that sort of song would type into the search bar. 

Obviously if it they have the title in mind they would type that, but many people are just looking for something different to listen to, or have gone through something and like many of us use music to accompany their joy/misery  Oh and make sure you use every last tag you're allowed to - that's important too in my opinion you may as well!

Oooh. Great ideas Flosster!

[Dutchbeat]

you are great at this, Flossie! thanks for sharing your ideas and experience on this

[James Nighthawk]

UPDATE

Only one week in, with granted some other variables, I seem to be getting 2-5 hits daily for my one video. This is good news, as all hits before were accountable via direct linkages!!

I will leave as is for the moment. NEXT week, I will be posting a cover version live video...lets see how this changes matters

JN

[leoweber909]

hi james....

I've got 11 videos on youtube of cover songs that have views from 3000 to 14000 for each one of them!

My biggest suggestion for you if you want to cover songs and put them on youtube is: BE THE FIRST! I learned that myself after posting covers that only reached 3000 views in 6 months because there were already tons of other covers. For those were I was the first or the second to cover it I got something at around 14000 and 12000 views in 2 months.

When using tags, don't worry too much about your name and more about the information on the song your covering, because that's what people will look for. I usually use tags such as cover, acoustic, etc. try everything related to that song. For example, if I was covering Let it be by the Beatles I'd use tags like: the beatles let it be acoustic cover 'let it be' 'the beatles' 'let it be cover' 'the beatles let it be cover' 'let it be acoustic' 'the beatles let it be acoustic' 'let it be acoustic cover' 'the beatles let it be acoustic cover'

Another tip is to add the chords to the description of the video so that you can also add tags like: "how to play let it be by the Beatles" "let it be chords" "let it be tabs" "let it be lyrics"

But the most important thing for getting views with cover songs is, like I said, BE THE FIRST!

Hope that helps.

[James Nighthawk]

Ohhh... Thanks Loey!

The chords idea is great, I'll be using that!

And I have just looked up my song. There only seems to be a few covers, a handful in fact, and most look very amateur. So I might have inadvertently taken your advice

Watch this space

[jillianne]

  I guess the secret is to see what's 'trending' and drop that into your title or tags .... but it's all pretty academic, sorry to be cynical.  I have hit many times on songs because they were listed with a tag I was searching thus giving them another hit to add to the thousands they already had via the same route.

[habiTat]

Any progress James?

I'm keen to learn how to climb up the search results myself as I have a few video projects in the pipeline.

hab..